Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> ...
> Considering the fact that both you and DanC [1] mistakenly typed a
> non-well-formed version of the DOCTYPE, and that on occasion, even I
> have accidentally omitted the PUBLIC keyword while typing the HTML4
> DOCTYPEs, I think this is evidence that it is more prone to errors and
> that we should not encourage people to use it at all. I think it is
> better to actively discourage its use and this is one reason why the
> perjorative alternatives are preferred.
> ...
The whole point in allowing a second doctype (or for changing it) is to
allow more people to produce *valid* documents right now.
It's not a feature for people who do not care about validity.
And no, I disagree that the 2nd notation needs to be ugly. It should be
as valid as the other one, so there's actually no reason to push people
into one direction.
>> 2) DOCTYPE with an optional null quoted string
>
> This alternative fails to discourage people from trying to use the
> longer alternative.
Which, to me, is a non-goal.
> We know from experience that people will often use the longer version of
> the HTML4 DOCTYPEs including the optional SYSTEM identifier, despite the
> fact that it is optional. It seems that there is a general perception
> that the longer alternative is better.
Why does it matter?
> ...
> I'm fine with both of these alternatives, although I have a preference
> for the latter because of the reason I pointed out in IRC yesterday [2]:
>
> <Lachy> the only problem with legacy-compat is that it's not entirely
> clear that it's meant for compat with legacy generator tools,
> like XSLT, rather than legacy consumers like browsers
> ...
This has been clarified a number of times by now; it's an issue that not
only applies to XSLT.
> Additionally, it's not clear to me which tools besides XSLT have
> difficulty outputting <!DOCTYPE html> in HTML serialisations, and thus
> what problem we are solving by changing "XSLT-compat" to
> "legacy-compat". (If such tools have been mentioned in previous
> threads, then I may have missed them)
Apparently.
> ...
Best regards, Julian